“At first, I didn’t feel these Democrats understood how common and damaging to business these marginal discrimination claims were, but then, these Democrats exempted school districts, cities, and counties from the lawsuits.

Sunstein first proposed the notion of imposing mandatory "electronic sidewalks" for the Net. These "sidewalks" would display links to opposing viewpoints. Adam Thierer, senior fellow and director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom at the Progress and Freedom Center, has characterized the proposal as "The Fairness Doctrine for the Internet."

Later, Sunstein rethought his proposal, explaining that it would be "too difficult to regulate [the Internet] in a way that would respond to those concerns." He also acknowledged that it was "almost certainly unconstitutional."

Not to mention that it would be impossible to implement.

It must be sweet to be an Eloi and get paid to come up with ideas that require someone to wave a wand and chant "and in Step 3, Magic happens".

The dude's other Big Idea [1] is a Civility Check. Which isn't, I think, such a terribly bad idea: the mail client has an opt-in that lets you send mail to a holding mailbox for x hours.

Awesome - as long as you can turn it off when you gotta send an update to your boss.

And .. if you can turn if off for that .. then you can easily turn it off to blast some meathead Eloi.

Might need a few tweaks there, Cass.

[1] Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones. P.J. O'Rourke

I think there’s a good chance that Wyatt will end up as a Marine some day. He’s smart, tough, mechanically inquisitive, likes talking about dead things, guns, and machines … and has absolutely no subtlety what-so-ever.

Now President Obama has named MADD CEO Chuck Hurley to head NHTSA. Drivers, car buyers, and the American public had better brace themselves for a season of neo-Prohibitionist rhetoric, nannyist initiatives, and efforts to criminalize now-lawful conduct. It won’t be pretty.

What .. the .. heck .. Obama administration? You're curtailing civil rights, dismantling Gitmo only to move it to Afghanistan, and etc and etc and so on and so forth and on top of all that you're placing the guy who runs the nervous-nelly MADD in charge of safety?

To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

At a meeting with executives from four of the nation's largest banks earlier this month, the chief of the government's auto task force, Steven Rattner, delivered a message that shocked some in the room.

To save Chrysler, he told them, the four banks and several other financial firms would have to surrender their claims to most of the $7 billion the automaker owed them. And what would the banks get in return for this sacrifice? Nothing.

People complain that the word "socialist" is being inappropriately used to demonize attempts at restoring economic growth. That may be true in many cases, but how is the label not valid here? Government officials are making decisions about how to direct the means of production. And they are doing so without prior authorization or agreement and with the goal of sustaining employment in undproductive pursuits. What else would you call it?

School suspects an student [1] is dealing Ibuprofen. School strips searches the student without notifying parents. Understandably upset, the family sues the district. It wound up at the Supreme Court last week.

"Apparently, by enrolling their children a public school, parents give their consent have a gloved hand inserted into their child’s anus."

Apparently so. Not my kids however: if you're smart and have the means not yours either.

[1] We are all equal in front of the law but you would think that an intelligent person acting in loco parentis would take into account that the girl was an honor student and had zero incidents of trouble in the past into account.

Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

Protests, aye we got 'em. Leadership to get in front of that pack and lead it somewhere productive ... not so much.

It is in that gap, that unfilled need for a fiscally conservative and socially neutral party, where the American Conservative Party is organizing. We seek to be the political arm for the tea party movement, the focused expression of voter rage. Started by blogger Bill Quick last year, the ACP is organizing chapters in 14 states already, with four more targeted for expansion this year.

Fiscally conservative and socially neutral. Beam .. me .. up.

Devil's in the details - time to do the clicky thing see what the problems are.

The Republicans don't suit me - never really did. I'm with the Democrats somewhat on social issues but the abortion thing puts me off. Libertarians have some of the right ideas, but wacked implementation.

Most of all I want something that Just Works without a lot of bullshit.

The whole point of using electricity instead of rubbing two sticks together is to eliminate work and therefore, necessarily, jobs. The whole point of an economy, of trade and commerce, of bankers, lawyers, miners, fishers, farmers, bakers, candlestickmakers and yes, even UAW members, is so I don’t have to do the work.

What possible point is there in increasing the amount of work, therefore jobs, we need to do to maintain our current level of wealth and comfort? What kind of nut would advocate this?

Leftists all think the amount of our money and our free time is infinite. Their own money and time? Not so much. Ask Tim Geithner.

Is everyone this damned ignorant about what an economy is? I was for sure until I got to Tim Worstall’s blog.

I would leave out the mud slinging against the leftists, but that is a personal choice.

One of the primary mistakes of people in the upper middle class is that they often forget that their relative comfort is not permanent. Sure we all understand that good grades in school lead to acceptance at a better college and a better job and all that, but we forget about earthquakes, floods, terrorist attacks and bank failures. The trick to rising in society is defensive as well as offensive. The point of rising in society is to have society's rules work in your favor. So I never forget that this destination, as chic and comfy as it often seems from my own 'hood sensibilities, is not really a destination. It is a temporary reprieve and a temporary reward. Life is still about struggle.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Of course I have an opinion too. But unlike the pundits I'll admit upfront that a) I'm wrong and b) I have no idea what I'm talking about. But there is c) which is I've been associated with threecompanies that were bought out.

The details are unimportant: the end result is. Customers were upset, people were laid off, careers derailed.

Long story short, Sun hardware is legacy, Solaris[1] is a dead OS walking, Java guys should crack an O'Reilly book on Python or Ruby, and MySQL has an interesting patch ahead.

Which, yes, is too g'd bad. And it doesn't make sense for Oracle [2] to buy a company and then mess with things. But guess what: companies do stuff like that all .. the .. time.

Ain't personal. The guys driving strategy just don't have any emotional involvement, don't care that you spent the last decade learning the ins/outs of Solaris and they could give a rat's behind that Sun hardware scales into spaces that a vendor like Dell can only dream of.

That is not their problem. Their problem is revenue. Oracle's revenue, not yours.

“So one of the things -- messages that I delivered today to all members of the Cabinet was, ‘As well as you've already done, you're going to have to do more.’ I'm asking for all of them to identify at least $100 million in additional cuts to their administrative budgets,” he said.

Bit by bit, line by line, $100 million by $100 million he's going to earn our trust.

Think of it in terms of a middle-class family budget: it's cutting out a singleHappy Meal during the next fiscal year.

Isn't that a drop in the bucket, the concerned reporter spouse asks?

“It is and that's what I just said," the president said. "None of these things alone are going to make the difference but cumulatively, they make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone. So what we're going to do is line by line, page by page, $100 million a Happy Meal there, $100 million a Starbucks Latte here, pretty soon, even in Washington, it adds up to real money.”

I went down to St. James Infirmary,Saw my baby there,Set down on a long white table,So sweet, so cold, so fair.Let her go, let her go, God bless her,Wherever she may be,She can look this wide world over,She'll never find a sweet man like me.